Moderation – Week 6
Where I reflect on movement, dissonance, libraries, chaotic joy, and a comic approach to life.
There is a physicality to everything I do. Yet I pay little attention to my body through the day, at least until various pains and aches bring it to consciousness. So, inspired by last week’s viewing of Dance Academy, I try taking a more mindful approach to my movements as an experience in developing moderation. What I quickly notice is how confused my posture is most of the time, as my body multitasks.
I walk to the bathroom. I monitor my surroundings and move in relation to them. I slide past a table, walk up three steps, push a door open. Meanwhile, all sorts of ideas, intentions and desires ripple across me, in a constant parallel track, resulting in micro-gestures half-initiated. I also notice my many mindless attempts at saving a minute here and there. I pack my bag, I close the curtains, or I clear the table while brushing my teeth, none of that very well. And then of course, there is my phone – checking messages, Reddit or the Guardian website as a constant background to my day. Torn between those activities – what I’m doing and half-doing, the physical and the virtual – my body tenses up, muscles and tendons in constant dissonance.
I call upon my experience of meditation to notice those tensions in my body, name them, breathe, and mindfully return to doing just one thing. I pay close attention to the gesture involved in that one thing I’m doing. I feel the muscles engaged in grabbing a cup to drink a sip of coffee, lifting my bag from the floor, or typing on my computer. For a moment at least, I live as if I was not a pure mind stuck in the meaty prison of my body, but a dancer in the rehearsal room, feeling my way through the movements of everyday life.
**
Mindless multi-tasking is just another form of bingeing, which I must be prone to. In conversation with a friend, we discuss our relationship to non-fiction along those lines. They find their approach painfully slow. They will read a few pages, then pause as they work their way through the facts and arguments. I’m voracious in comparison. Rather than carefully breaking the bones of a book to suck in its susbtantific marrow, I gobble it and let it pass through me, hoping for the best. In part, it’s hedonism: non-fiction as mental self-soothing. But there’s another reason for my voracity. What I look for is not discrete facts or chains of reasoning. It’s new themes for me to consider, or new connections between domains and observations. I’m not looking to place an item of knowledge in my mental library. Rather, I hope that the book, as it passes through me, will scrape off a thin layer of the crass prejudice I’ve accumulated simply by living in the world and listening to the voices that float around.
I’ve been an avid reader since I was a child. In peak periods, I would read over 200 books a year. I’m at about a third of that now, but continue to devour large quantities. As I changed apartments, and later moved across the world, I’ve had to cull my library multiple times. I still mourn some of the books I let go. I remember Agatha Christie paperbacks, a shelf of contemporary French poetry, most of Balzac’s Human Comedy. I have boxes in my father’s cellar full of literature that I will never touch again. Even after switching largely to Kindle, I must keep a regular ritual, where I shuffle through the shelves and get rid of what I no longer need. Multiple boxes go to the Op Shop every time. Still my shelves are full.
I’ve been in a creative phase for almost a year now, and will remain in it for a few more months. It’s been a great occasion to practice moderation. With limited amounts of money coming in, I maintain my balance by limiting outgoings. I largely stopped buying new books, and use the local library instead. When I see something that I want, I go to their app and order it. I get a notification when it’s available at my local branch on Flinders Lane, two blocks from where I live. Sometimes, I have to wait, but I do get the joy of churning through large quantities of books, even borrow some I never read. Every visit is a reminder that I live in a place of abundance. No need for hoarding then, or stressing about the future too much. There is a lifetime of intellectual pleasure available at no cost, minutes from where I live.
**
On Friday night, an apricot slice experiment goes haywire. We’re having people over on the week-end for an event we’re calling ‘Sweet Sunday’. It’s an open-door house party for no reason, with cake and other sweet things. I found a Hungarian cookbook in my cupboard – who knows how it got there in the first place – and decided to make something from it. Except, I did that chaotically. There is butter and cream in the dough. It sticks to my fingers in big clumps. I don’t want to wash it all down the sink, so fumble with a fork. Of course, as I grab the fork with one hand to clean up the other, the dough sticks to the fork, spreads all over the hand, and soon everything is covered.
Meanwhile, the recipe book is confusing. I don’t find instructions for the apricot filling – I figure out after the fact that they’re on another page. That’s ok, I make something up, mashing up a tin of apricots in juice with walnuts. Which ends up being way too runny. As I pour the filling in the tin, and try layering the rest of the dough on top, it squirts and spills all over the place. I end up pouring the lot in a bowl, and mix everything together to make some sort of cake batter. I grab almond meal to thicken it. The bag explodes when I open it. Half of it is on the floor. There’s mashed up apricot on the table cloth. I put the cake in the oven, look around, and laugh. It’s so much fun to make a mess!
Later that night, I watch The Witches of Eastwick. It’s celebration of women’s power: invoke the devil, recognise him, get the better of him. This tale of self-awareness and ingenuity reminds me that my most fundamental belief – and my greatest hope – lies in our capacity to be different than we are. Our identities are fluid. People change, collectives evolve, healing is possible, if we so choose. What allows it is not so much earnest authenticity, but a smart game of mirrors. Illusion, delusion and recognition deployed strategically. It’s a comic approach to life, anchored in a principle of abundance. Material reality may be scarce, but not so combinations and relationships.
This open-ended attitude to the world is not a universal aspiration though. The world of The Handmaid’s Tale is biologically determined. The same goes for nationalist ideologies, and many forms of identity politics. Those fixed views of the world have a dangerous appeal: stick to your lane morality can easily pass off as moderation. When I hear any calls to police pleasure and play, therefore, I prick up my ears and wonder: should we not rather moderate our desire for things to be structured and respectable. Is it not worth accepting a touch of chaos, excess and silliness, if the yield is greater freedom and abundance for all?